Stories Store Knowledge as Metaphor
by Paul Levy
We love stories. From our earliest days of rational, self-conscious thought, stories have embedded information essential for survival into stories for the next generation. Stories are an effective way of preserving knowledge and enhancing learning.
How far back does this tradition of storytelling go? Paleo-anthropologists claim that we are essentially the same creature as we were 60,000 years and upwards of 120,000 years ago. As new scientific discoveries are made, our connection with our ancient ancestors is pushed deeper and deeper into our past.
For example, cuneiform of the ancient Sumerians provides among the first examples of writing, going back to 3,000 to 4,000 B.C. However, humans have been recording information long before this in far simpler forms, including such practices as making notches on a stick, for example.
The human mind is hardwired to seek explanations for the world around us. Before the advent of scientific inquiry in ancient Greece, we used storytelling to help us to make sense out of life and of the environment. Our nature made it vital for us to develop an understanding our personal relationship to plants, animals, and climate. We had to figure out how to maneuver in the environment, but it was also necessary to support others with the information so that they too could survive.
That's why we find ancient stories which mention the use of plants and herbs, some of which are poisonous and others beneficial. There are stories around how people should treat each other. All of this knowledge was embedded in mystical, cultural and religious contexts.
There are stories about animals and our relationship to them. One of the early cultures taught that the world was supported by a huge turtle, which was in turn, sitting on top of another turtle and so on. Turtles all the way down. (Let us not forget that, if we indeed reincarnate, that we are our own ancestors).
It is, in fact, our ability to pass on information to each other that we, as just another creature, have become so dominant.
As scientific inquiry gradually took hold during the Renaissance, such mythologies seem more fairy tale than fact. While there are hundreds, thousands likely, of mythological explanations for the world around us, science gives a more useful explanation of things. Rather than the earth being set upon on stacked turtles (as one ancient myth suggested), we now know that the Earth is suspended in space.
Yet science too, gives us stories to explain the world around us; stories that help answer the "hows" of life but thought cannot explain the "whys".
Aside from the useful information embedded in the world's mythologies, cultures, and religions, there is also coercion and manipulation. We find plenty of politics in the culture of science. It's not surprising because we humans are politicians by nature.
Because of our political nature, I have carefully selected how and when to use stories to teach about life's principles. Stories are useful because they help to sustain the lessons in the mind, but lose their usefulness when taken too literally.
In the following section I will share some of the stories that I have been taught. My hope is that these stories are useful. Stories store knowledge as metaphor.